WHO and commercial interests

Apparently the World Health Organization has an explicit policy that it will only enter into formal relations with NGOs if they are not fronts for commercial entities.  I think that is a great policy, and admirable in this day of uncritical trust in public-private partnerships.  Here is an article about the difficulty the WHO has in weeding out NGOs that are in fact front groups for private companies, from legitimate organizations working for a nonprofit purpose.

The food commons

This article presents a vision of food as a public good, to be managed in the commons and not solely by private market exchanges.  As with any truly novel, groundbreaking vision, it is hard to even imagine a world in which food were regarding like air, or wildlife, or public health, namely as a public good and not a private one.  But it is a vision worth considering and striving for, given all the problems that arise from treating food like any other private good.

Malawi's fertilizer subsidies

A new book has come out analyzing the economic results of Malawi's fertilizer subsidy policy.  This policy has received a lot of attention since its inception in 2005, first because it flew in the face of neoliberal thinking, then because it actually seemed to be working well, and later on because, at least in 2008/2009, the high cost of fertilizer made the program appear to be teetering on the edge of collapse. 

Far from the simplistic pro- vs. anti-free market platitudes often offered up in relation to this program, this book gives a very wide-ranging, well-thought analysis of the effects of fertilizer subsidies on the entire Malawian economy.  The authors conclude that the program has generally been a success, with a benefit/cost ratio of about 1.35, meaning that the benefits accruing to the economy are about 35% more than the costs incurred in the program.  I am not quite sure what they mean by "fiscal efficiency", because the 0.6 they report as a good result would not in fact be good if this were calculated as net present value divided by government expenditure.  I have to believe from skimming through the book and other writings that the authors' definition of fiscal efficiency is in fact (NPV/government expenditure)-1, which would validate their positive assessment of the program.  If my interpretation is right, for every dollar spent by the Malawian government on the subsidy program, the authors' fiscal efficiency numbers would indicate that it generated $1.60 in value for the economy. 

I have not read through the entire book, but it looks like a valuable addition to the discussion about how useful a tool fertilizer subsidy policies are.

What Darwin never knew

This is an excellent general overview of evolution by natural selection, care of NOVA.  It explains how Darwin started thinking about why animals are so diverse, and came to his brilliant conclusions.  It then goes on to explain basic genetics, gene expression, and embryo development.  For anyone unclear on how evolution works, or especially anyone skeptical that evolution by natural selection does indeed occur, I highly recommend the video.  For that matter, it is a good reminder to those who work in genetic engineering:  there is much more to the genome than simply the relatively few genes that we see expressed, much that we don't understand.  This should certainly be cause for humility for anyone who thinks himself master of genetics, simply because he's figured out the function of a few genes, or can even transfer individual genes from one place to another.

Markets and inequality

This is a review of recent work by an economist name Pikkety that seems to show that capitalism inevitably leads to greater inequality.  This is not a surprise to those of us who understand the logic of compound interest.  What is shocking and distressing is the implication that we might not be able to staunch or counteract this growth in inequality through smart policy.

A voice from inside the TSA

This is a funny, yet worrying, account of what it is like to work for the Transportation Security Administration.  It confirms what many of us have surely suspected:  that many TSA measures are ineffectual and are simply an expensive waste of time.  At any rate, from now on I will definitely avoid those naked-body scanners when I go through the airport.

Food preferences in children

This article describes research indicating that children's food preferences may be heavily influenced by their mother's eating habits during gestation and breastfeeding.  If this is true, it is somewhat disheartening for those of us that hope that eaters in the US and elsewhere will get away from junk food diets, because the research suggests that it is difficult to draw people away from junk food preferences, while to the contrary, it seems very possible to convert people from non-junk food eaters to junk food eaters.  Hence the natural flow is for people to eat more and more junk food, and if you were eating junk food in the womb or while breastfeeding, it is very difficult to reverse your preferences for it. In this respect, I have spent much of my first son's infancy neurotically worrying that his changes in taste (a rejection of guavas after a period of intense guavophagy, fluctuations in his willingness to eat broccoli, temporary preferences for bread over rice or vice versa) are indicative of an irrevocable drive toward a junk food diet.

On the other hand, I feel that in our culture at large and even in our scientific research, we in the US have an absolutist treatment of things that causes us to fixate on irreversible "nature" as opposed to the ability of humans to grow and change.  I guess we're all Freudians at heart, convinced that adult behavior is indelibly programmed at some point in some nebulous formative window in childhood.  We worry that if our kids aren't exposed to enough reading, or a good preschool, or the right foods when they are little, they are doomed to poor lifestyle choices.  There is certainly evidence that points in this direction, but I have personally seen many drastic conversions or evolutions in my own and other people's tastes and thinking, such that I am not entirely convinced that all is lost once childhood eating and thinking patterns are set.

At any rate, I very much like the article's clarity that processed foods, including infant formula, are poor substitutes for real food.  This line is great, and rarely heard so clearly in media discussions of food:  "Functional foods, or foods that allegedly deliver nutritional benefit beyond what is available in natural foods, are a food industry creation to convince consumers that their products are superior to, or can replace, natural, whole foods."

Whence and whither Atlanta?

I don't know much about Atlanta, other than what I've read.  I've never been there, though my impression of the place as a poorly-planned posterchild for suburban sprawl seems to be born out by the numbers; a city of a few hundred thousand in the middle of a multi-million-person metro area.  The recent snowstorm and attendant traffic jam further confirms my impression.

Since I don't really have much insight on the situation, I'll just link to other sites that have spoken more authoritatively on the suburban sprawl roots of the problem.  Matthew Yglesias gives a brief but clear description of Atlanta's urban planning shortcomings.  Politico magazine gave a more in-depth treatment.  And finally, CNN gave a scolding but relevant review of possible ways to avoid such problems in the future.

23 things they don't tell you about capitalism

I just finished a book by economist Ha-Joon Chang dispelling some of the free-market dogmatic myths that have propagated themselves in the past few decades.  It is written in an accessible, straightforward style that helps even laypeople understand complex economics questions.  Many of his points shouldn't be news to anyone who has thought critically about the current global economic system.  Some of Chang's points pertaining to the importance of government action through anti-free market policies I had already read about more in-depth in his prior work, Kicking away the Ladder.  But "23 things they don't tell you about capitalism" is a great, succinct summary of the most salient critiques to the prevailing free market ideology. 

The book did confront me with at least one very new piece of information to think about; education is not a reliable engine for economic development.  (This is in contrast to job-related training, which does have a demonstrable effect on economic growth, as job training is linked directly to increased productivity).  The education-development causal link was a bit of received orthodoxy I had always taken to be true, but Ha-Joon Chang shows pretty clearly that higher education as such (and even much of pre-college education) is often not a very direct contributor to nor a predictor of a country's growth.  It makes sense when you think about it.  Granted, individually a bachelor's degree or a doctorate can move you into higher-paying fields, but this is often due more to the filtering effect of a degree--many jobs are open only to holders of certain levels of educational credentials, even if that education isn't directly relevant to job duties.  In the aggregate, this means that as a nation's populace becomes more educated, it doesn't make the nation more prosperous, because most of that education does not result in new businesses or new sectors.  The increased education simply raises the bar of what's considered standard.  Jobs that used to require a high school degree now require a bachelor's, those that used to want a bachelor's want a master's, etc.  Anyway, I have always been a firm believer in the importance of education, so this shook me a bit.  But Chang's evidence and his logic are irrefutable, and in the end it does jibe with my anecdotal experience of the education-development link (or lack thereof). 

Given this new discovery about education, I have to revise my opinion of it.  I still believe that education is the best way of freeing one's mind and expanding one's horizons, and the type of education that truly does inspire people to think in new ways should in fact result in economic growth, as people come up with novel business ideas.  But for the most part, I can no longer assume that improving education in a country improves that country's overall economic performance.  In fact, a darker side of Chang's assertion is that if education does not promote overall growth, but does sort and filter the workforce, then much of education's role in a modern economy is a pernicious one--not the expansion of minds and opportunities, but rather a way to cement the advantages of some people while firmly excluding others from prosperity.  In this light, at least in the US where there are still large disparities in access to what is considered "quality" education, it becomes a zero-sum game in which the success of some (the educated ones) comes at the expense of others (those without education), even though many jobs could ostensibly be performed equally well by many people, regardless of their formal credentials. 

If this is the case, the answer is not to stifle education, but rather to assure equal access to it.  This would on the one hand level the playing field such that education ceases to play a sorting, exclusionary role, while at the same time allowing us to focus on providing education that is really worthwhile and liberating, as opposed to education designed to help the learner get ahead in the job market.  This new, equally available education would not magically create economic growth, as Chang clearly shows, but rather it would create better thinkers, better critics, better artists, better human beings, whose lives are more meaningful, and their contributions to their society greater, thanks to their education.  This education would have to be not some rote technical training to prepare the workforce, but a liberal, Classical education.  As I noted above, more technical, job-related training does in fact contribute to economic growth and should also be encouraged and generalized, but most job-related training can occur in short programs of a few months or years, not the 12-16 years of basic education that we now consider standard for the formation and socialization of children and young people.  Separating into two different categories the idea of a Classical, mind-expanding basic education (which should be available to everyone), and a more job-focused training that directly creates economic growth (and which should be open to everyone according to their job field but would obviously not be the same for everyone) helps me to somewhat resolve the dilemma I'd discussed in an earlier blog post, about my conflicted feelings as to whether college should be universal or not.

Anyway, I'll close with the eight principles that Dr. Chang explains at the end of his book, which do a good job of summarizing the rest of the work.  Here they are:

1. Capitalism, yes, but we need to end our love affair with unrestrained free-market capitalism, which has served humanity so poorly, and install a better-regulated variety.
2. We should build our new economic system on the recognition that human rationality is severely limited.
3. We should build a system that brings out the best, rathr than worst, in people.
4. We should stop believing that people are always paid what they "deserve".
5. We need to take "making things" more seriously.
6. We need to strike a better balance between finance and "real" activities.
7. Government needs to become bigger and more active.
8. The world economic system needs to "unfairly" favor developing countries.

If you want more detail on these eight points or anything else about Ha-Joon Chang's thinking, I highly encourage you to check out "23 things they don't tell you about capitalism".

Third World Green Daddy 56: High-flying media

We’ve taken a few plane trips lately, in the course of moving to Chicago for the summer, coming back to Colombia, moving to DC, and now visiting Colombia once again.  These plane trips have inspired me to reflect on the ubiquity of electronic media, and how this affects our society.

This Christmas break we had a decent pair of flights from Washington, DC to Bogota, Colombia.  They were harrowing insofar as we were traveling with two kids and a lot of luggage, but there were really no major incidents along the way.  

 In the first flight we were “treated” to an episode of the TV show “Parks and Recreation” on the overhead screens.  There was no sound, since we didn’t want to see it and didn’t have headphones, but from time to time we couldn’t help catching a scene here or there.  We had also seen an episode in this way on a prior flight a few months ago.  Caro finds this show extremely offensive.  She doesn’t get worked up about much in life, and again, all she or I caught of the show were stray scenes, with no sound.  But this perhaps amplified what offends Caro.  Watching the exaggerated facial expressions of the characters, their exaggerated eye makeup and mustaches and hair, just gets under my wife’s skin.  One of the very clearly defined values of the general culture in our provincial peasant region of Colombia, and even more pronounced in my wife’s upbringing in an austere, borderline Marxist household, is an appreciation for modesty and simplicity.  Anything that seems excessive, be it clothes or mannerisms or ways of talking, whips my wife into a frenzy of annoyance.  The mere presence of jewelry or perfume makes it difficult for my wife to be around someone!

Caro’s annoyance with this show that we’ve barely even seen struck me as doubly funny.  First off, it is rare and entertaining to see her break out of her normal, quiet reserve and really get angry at something.  Secondly, it occurred to me that Parks and Recreation is one of those shows that’s supposed to be ironic, subtle, the height of our sophisticated humor in the US.  But Caro sees it more like someone in the US might look at one of those ridiculous, over-the-top Mexican joke programs with people dressed up in silly outfits and acting stupid.  She sees shows like Parks and Recreation as a real cultural nadir!

On many of these plane rides, there is a lot of violent fare, big-budget action movies and the sequels thereof.  I saw most of Iron Man 3 on one flight, again in silence.  It struck me as so silly and preposterous, representative of an entirely mistaken tack that much of modern entertainment has taken.  It seems that many filmmakers have an industrial mechanization vision of art—the more, newer technology you put in, the better it will be.  Of course this is silly.  The great drama of Classical Greece or Elizabethan England, the great novels of the modern US or Latin America, these cannot be improved upon by adding more gadgets or explosions.  Great art speaks to the timeless traits of humanity, the existential questions, and these remain similar throughout history, regardless of the technological context in which the art is made.  Technology does indeed have a place in art—the Kindle makes books easier to access for certain people, the Internet allows any old Joe to post his thoughts on a blog to share with the world, and improved manufacturing techniques have brought musical instruments within the economic reach of more people.  The raised stage, the moving camera, the piano, these were technologies that indeed redefined entire segments of artistic expression.  I can even appreciate the fascination and joy caused by really well-done special effects in a film or a live concert.  But when you build art entirely around a technology, when a film is little more than a platform to showcase bigger and better explosions, then it ends up not being worth the price of admission, and will certainly not endure in time as a great work that speaks to people on a deep level.  The returns to technology diminish very quickly in art.

I know I’ve spoken about media violence in past blogs, and specifically about Matt Damon.  But I never cease to be shocked at how much of his film credits have him running about with guns, wreaking murder and mayhem.  The Bourne series, Green Zone, some movie where he’s in a post-apocalyptic forsaken planet…it seems like every time I see him in something, he’s waving a gun around.  It is particularly shocking because he is fairly politically outspoken, even radical, in terms of questioning the prevailing economic and social arrangements in US society, and especially in questioning war.  Why then isn’t he more discerning in choosing roles that glorify violence? 

In the second leg of the trip, from Miami to Bogota, we were in a bigger plane, with personal TV monitors in front of every seat.  We turned off our monitors as soon as we could, though Sam was interested in putting on the free headphones they gave to us.  He has seen people use headphones, and has used them long ago with his cousin and his sister, but he isn’t that familiar with them.  So he just put them on his ears, and I’m not sure if he knew music was supposed to come out, and certainly not how to make it come out.  It made my wife and me feel sort of bad, because we don’t want Sam to be some kind of wolf child raised in the wilderness and unaware of the mores and technology of the society surrounding him.  I know lots of parents want to make sure their kids are electronically savvy; this isn’t a prime concern of mine, though I realize that technology comprises an important part of the medium and the language in which our lives take place these days.  I just figure our sons will learn whatever they need to about headphones and electronics and the lot, as new situations present themselves.  I don’t want Sam to be maladapted, but if he is, I’d rather it be in the sense of underexposure to technology, and not the more common maladaptation of a kid who is constantly hooked up to one or more electronic devices, thus cut off from the real world around him.

After sleeping for a while, Sam started coloring in these special books we’d bought him.  They’re coloring books with just one marker, and if you color the pictures with that marker, different colors and hidden shapes come out.  I had gotten him these books specially for the plane trip, and they were very effective at keeping him busy.  I imagine you could argue that such a coloring book stifles creativity, since the kid doesn’t choose what colors to use nor where to put them.  It’s true too that they advertise on their cover that they make for “no-mess coloring”, and usually when a kid’s product tries to satisfy parents by eliminating mess, it does so at the expense of the child’s ability to experiment and be in charge of his own creations.  At any rate, these coloring books are just an occasional novelty for Sam—I wouldn’t want him to color exclusively in pre-fab workbooks like that.  At the same time, I laugh at myself for worrying about stifling my son’s creativity with a coloring book, when all around us on the plane there were kids staring at iPad screens, playing video games, and watching the in-flight TVs!

Eventually the flight crew took away the little bit of autonomy that we had to choose our own, non-electronic entertainment.  Around 5pm, they inexplicably turned off all lights in the cabin, and the individual overhead lights didn’t work.  For a while Sam and I both nobly tried to work in the dark, he coloring in his book and I reading my John LeCarre novel.  But eventually it was too dark even for that.  When I got up to ask the flight attendants about the overhead lights, I marveled at the view from the back of the plane:  a fleet of glowing screens floating through a sea of darkness.  This is the future we are creating for ourselves—no choice but to stare passively at screens in the night of our unthinking.

Anyway, Sam and I started to watch Mulan on my movie screen.  He liked it, and finally had his headphones connected, though often he would take them off and just preferred to watch the screen in silence!  When the cabin lights came back on, he got excited and said, “Now I can color!” 

It’s not that Sammy doesn’t like TV.  He is crazy about a show called Handy Manny, about a Latino repairman with a box of talking tools.  I actually like this program.  It presents a positive Latino role model who values working with his hands.  His being a repairman isn’t a bad or shameful thing, a result of a lack of other options, or a fulfillment of a stereotype.  No, his choice of profession is based on his values, his belief in being autonomous and resourceful and not wasting anything.  He is a valued member in his neighborhood, because he helps everyone fix their problems.  Furthermore, the show is explicitly educational, but with concrete applications to daily life.  In the course of fixing things, Manny explains how screws go in, how to make plans and measure before doing anything, and any number of practical handyman tips.  Beyond this, there are explicit messages encouraging viewers to fix things instead of throwing them away, to work and play together instead of relying on electronic devices, or to go outside instead of watching TV.  We still only let Sam watch a few episodes on the weekend, but I do like this program. 

I hope that in the future, TV will remain a very secondary part of Sam’s life.  I don’t mind if TV is one thing among many that he and Paulo take part in, just as I don’t mind if they eat cotton candy once in a while if it’s not the mainstay of their diet.  The issue is that TV by its nature is able to so enwrap and monopolize one’s time and attention, that without constant vigilance to cut down its influence, it can easily take over. 

I have seen hints of this pernicious electronic invasion in Sam’s preschool.  First of all, I want to reiterate that I’m happy with the preschool in our new neighborhood in Virginia, just as I have been pleased with his preschools in Bogota and our small town in Colombia.  But as with these prior schools, I’d be remiss not to notice and try to remedy things that I see wrong with his current place.  Caro recently took a tour with the school director, just to get a better sense of what they do in a typical day.  She liked it, and from what she described to me, I’m happy with most of what the school offers. 

But there are a few problems, and I think they are related to our society’s general overconsumption of television, and the corresponding expectation to have everything your way, right away.  First off, there is no set reading time at the school.  The kids have two academic classes a day, and usually these involve reading with the teacher.  Kids are also free to look at books on their own during naptime.  But there is no designated period when everyone sits down just to hear a story from the teacher.  I worry about this, because I feel that a major problem with our education system in the US (and in much of the world) is that we use reading as a tool to accomplish concrete goals (problem-solving, doing a work task, following instructions, etc.), but not that many people read for its own sake.  Reading as a pastime in itself is one of the best ways to develop critical thinking, creativity, imagination, and to explore and appreciate life in general.  Much formal education, by overemphasizing tangible skills and underemphasizing exploration, shows children how to do things, but doesn’t give them the criteria to understand why we do them, or why we live in general.

What does this have to do with TV?  A few things.  First off, Sam’s school replaces reading time with TV.  They call it reading time, but it is actually kids watching a TV.  The kids see cartoon presentations of different classic books like Curious George or the Cat in the Hat.  This is in lieu of having the teachers sit down and read them the actual books.  Caro and I assume that this is in part because most of the teachers have Latino accents when they read English, so maybe they are uncomfortable or want the kids to hear a native English voice.  The school doesn’t seem to see any problem with showing a TV show and calling it reading.  But it is a mistake to mix up reading and television, just as drama or painting or music are different media, and no one would ever call music by the name of film, or vice versa.  Furthermore, by dividing school into “work-time”, when kids are in class and applying reading to an academic goal, and “play-time”, when they’re not reading (and when in fact they’re watching TV), the teachers are reinforcing the habit of regarding reading and thinking as cumbersome “work”, and defining “leisure” as the passive consumption of outside (usually electronic) media.  Such an attitude is behind many problems we are facing right now as a society—lack of critical thinking, passive lifestyles, disengagement from the world.

I also wonder if the teachers assume that kids won’t sit through an actual person reading, at least not the same way they remain rapt with the TV.  If so, this would indicate a general attitude of trying not to challenge the kids but rather just providing them with mindless, attention-grabbing entertainment.  Perhaps the same philosophy drives the school’s playing of background music for a good part of the day.  When kids are playing, they are surrounded by a barrage of recorded kids’ songs.  Caro told the director that she didn’t like this, but the director said most of the teachers think it’s pleasant.  It seems to me one more attempt to keep kids constantly distracted and entertained, so they don’t have to learn how to just be tranquil and occupy themselves. 

The school’s general philosophy of appeasement probably aligns with the attitude of many of the parents they serve.  If a kid doesn’t want to eat what’s served for lunch, they try to give him or her something else to eat.  If a child doesn’t want to participate in a given activity, they invent something else to entertain him with.  I feel that childrearing in the US has a heavy dose of this attitude of trying to satisfy children’s every whim, instead of insisting that they do certain things that are healthy and appropriate for them, even if they don’t initially want to do them.  I can imagine that the school is reluctant to offend any parents by not catering to their children’s caprices, so they, like the parents themselves, are compelled to seek any number of distractions and opiates to keep kids from “acting up”, which is to say from acting like kids.  But as with real opiates, such an approach requires ever-escalating investments in distraction.  You start with pacifiers and blankies and stuffed animals, then kids need an endless procession of new toys, and eventually adolescents need a constant fix of electronic devices, an addiction that continues into adulthood.  The net result is that from infancy to adulthood, people are kept distracted from the world around them, and from their own thoughts.

Anyway, I clearly don’t agree with this way of doing things, and I do fear that Sam will be gradually drawn away from good habits like reading and silence, and drawn toward the nonstop electronic euphoria that our modern society offers.  One consolation is that my kids probably won’t spend most of their life in the US, so whatever negative tendencies I feel are more prevalent here, I can keep my kids away from them.  But beyond trying to withdraw from this aspect of today’s world, I think the more responsible attitude is to actively work to fix it.  In that sense, I would very much like to learn more about Sam’s school’s philosophies and practices regarding reading time, and perhaps offer my assistance to give kids some regular, dedicated time slots of having an adult read aloud to them.

I'll leave off this blog post with an ironic reflection on TV and movies.  Have you ever noticed that in most shows or movies, characters rarely watch television?  They are too busy doing whatever that episode’s storyline demands of them, running around, living life.  It makes sense, because it would be boring to watch others watching TV, but considering that the average person in the States watches two to four hours of TV daily, it is patently unrealistic if the characters we watch, who are supposed to be like us, watch none.  So finally what we’re left with is a nation of real people not living life, watching fictional people, who are the only ones actually doing anything!

A sloth's microbiome

This is about the coolest article ever, about the organisms growing on and around the three-toed sloth.  Apparently, the sloth harbors a species of moth in its fur, which fertilizes a type of algae that also grows in the fur, and the sloth eats the algae as a supplementary food source.  I don't imagine the preacher who wrote, "Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the works thy hands have made," was imagining sloth-fur algae.  But I'd put this ecological discovery right up there with the really important finds that help to explain a part of our world.

Muddy dealings with transgenic wheat

My cousin recently shared with me this article by Jayson Lusk claiming that we in the US really need transgenic wheat, whether we know it or not.  Essentially the author, a respected economist, argues that wheat acreage is down and farmers are abandoning the crop because they don't have easy-to-manage transgenic seed varieties to compete with corn.  This is quite a precarious logical leap, and only the first intellectually dishonest thing the author does.  Other intellectual trickery involves implying that transgenic crops yield more than non-transgenics; they don't, and no company has ever claimed they do.  The appeal of transgenic corn and beans has always been the ease and cheapness of crop management, never an increased yield (which is only achieved through boring old conventional breeding techniques).  The author then goes on to specious appeals to a monolithic scientific consensus (only uninformed non-scientists every actually believe that there is a unified scientific "truth" to any question), game-changing genetic engineering breakthroughs that are always just on the cusp of happening (when the author should know well that demonstration of potential in the laboratory is a far cry from proving usefulness in farmers' fields), and subtly implying that the Western US's irresponsible use of groundwater is due mainly to a reluctance to embrace genetic engineering.  He finishes off by implying that it is onerous government regulation, as opposed to a generalized market rejection of GM wheat by the consuming public in the US and abroad, that is hindering the spread of transgenic wheat.

Wheat acreage is indeed down since 1990, but any good economist, Lusk certainly included, knows that you can't explain a massive economic trend with a simple one-to-one correlation.  Furthermore, the decrease in wheat acreage doesn't even correlate that well with the rise of transgenic corn and soybeans.  If you look either at the USDA data that the author cites (which is in the form of a somewhat-unwieldy Excel table) or at FAOSTAT's page (which you can manipulate to show you acreage harvested of any crop, in any country, over any years), you'll see that wheat acreage had a huge drop in 1998-2000, and has fluctuated around a new, lower "normal" since then.  This drop was at the very front end of the rise of transgenic corn and soybean varieties, so I don't imagine it's that likely that one thing had to do much with the other.  If you track corn acreage on FAOSTAT, it did indeed increase a lot after 2000 (after not having moved much from the 80s to 2000), but again, if wheat acreage was more or less stable during that post-2000 period, it would seem that corn is not expanding at the expense of wheat.

I can think of many other possible explanations for the drop in wheat acreage and the expansion in corn acreage.  Cotton acreage has decreased a lot since 2000, as has sorghum.  Apparently corn is expanding in former cotton areas.  Demand for corn has skyrocketed as more people in the world eat more meat, and the US consumes more corn ethanol fuel.  I also imagine that, since irrigation has expanded drastically since the 1980s, corn is being grown in areas that would normally be too dry for it.  Some of this may even be in the Midwestern wheat belt; FAOSTAT data doesn't show a big decrease in total wheat in the nation as corn has expanded, but maybe corn is being grown on former wheat land, and wheat is being pushed onto former barley land (barley has gone down a lot since 2000).  Who knows?  Another factor is that corn yields go up drastically every year thanks to intensive (non-transgenic) breeding efforts.  Corn and often even soybeans are more profitable per acre than is wheat; I mean just look at this chart of prices since 1990.  Soybeans yield about as much as wheat per acre, but get twice the price per bushel and don't require many inputs, while corn gets just a bit less per bushel than wheat and yield 2-4 times as much per acre on suitable land.  Traditionally in the US wheat was planted on land that was too dry or cold for these other crops.  But again, in the past twenty years irrigation has increased quite a bit, which means you can grow corn on a lot more land than you could before.  Or perhaps it's simply that wheat has a rather inelastic demand, meaning that people in the US and the world eat a set amount that does not change much due to price fluctuations.  If this is the case, higher yields today mean that we are producing roughly as much wheat as we did in the 90s with a fair amount less land (again, just check the USDA data), so maybe there's not much price incentive to plant any more land.

The bottom line is that I don't know if any of my possible explanations for wheat acreage's fall in the 1990s and stagnation thereafter, and corn's rise after 2000, are correct or incorrect.  What I do know is that cropping trends are complex and multicausal, so it's irresponsible of the economist author to blithely imply that the unavailability of transgenic wheat was a major or the major driving factor in the reduction in its acreage from 1990 to the present. This article from a farmer association in Minnesota gives a more nuanced, on-the-ground view of why wheat acreage is declining.  It includes the lack of availability of easy-to-manage transgenic wheat varieties as one factor influencing the trend, but by no means the principal factor.  Even in their analysis of the transgenics question, this article shows a lot more complexity than the NYT booster piece; the lack of market acceptance of transgenic wheat has meant that big private breeders shy away even from conventional wheat breeding, since these companies wouldn't be as readily able to monopolize their improved (but non-patented) seedstock.  This means that wheat yields don't grow as fast as corn yields, not because transgenics aren't employed for wheat, but because big seed companies don't give wheat much attention.

I am not in principle opposed to transgenics.  I remain open to the case that can be made for transgenics or any other technology as a real solution to insoluble problems.  For example, some of the work with virus-resistant cassava in Africa seems like a fitting application of the technology where conventional breeding hadn't been able to come up with a solution.

The problem is that few promoters of transgenic breeding have proven to me to be good-faith, honest dealers.  We see this with Lusk's article.  In this and countless other offerings, from countless other authors, to both the general public and the specialized press (science publications, development journals, etc.), we get half-truths, boosterism, specious claims, and faulty logic.  The net effect is to make me suspect the agenda driving so many people to be so monolithically deceptive in their promotion of transgenics.  Again, I am not opposed to the mere idea of transgenics, but when I feel like they're being shoved down my throat, I don't like it.  The fact that the half-honest, weaselly rhetoric promoting transgenics in general happens to align nicely with the bottom line of unethical, monopolistic rent-seeking corporations like Monsanto or Syngenta further weakens the impression that one is dealing with honest, transparent interlocutors.

In the case of Jayson Lusk, he has taken great pains to make clear that he receives no payouts from Monsanto or any other seed company for his transgenic advocacy, and I believe him.  But that doesn't make his logic any sounder; as with the promoters of neoliberal economic policies who do so out of conviction and not for personal profit, I feel that the arguments of such uncritical boosters of transgenics are both misplaced, and favorable to cynical companies that exploit these sincere intellectual allies.  Whether it's for money or dogma or contrarianism or true conviction, I feel that the transgenic promoters are pushing something else, beyond the merits of the technology itself.  They must be driven by some ulterior motive that I don't fully understand, and that I probably wouldn't agree with given their secrecy about it all.  I'm sure many of these boosters would claim that they're up against unfair, irrational fears and derision from the general public and anti-GMO civil society groups, but this is no excuse for a true scientist (or other intellectual) to be deceptive.  Science and all other academic inquiry is about integrity, about making only the claims that your evidence can back soundly.  Bombardment of the press and the public with hysterical, histrionic elegies to transgenics?  This has nothing to do with integrity.

Agriculture as mistake

This is an old article from Jared Diamond, later of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" fame.  He posits the invention of agriculture as humankind's gravest mistake, in terms of quality of life.  Anywhere where intensive agriculture has replaced a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, it marked a drastic reduction in quality of life--more work, more hunger, more disease, more war and inequality.  (A case that neither Diamond nor many archeologists study very much is that of New World tropical horticulturists, who cultivated and still cultivate plants as a complement, not a replacement to, their hunting and gathering.)  Only in the 20th century have medical advances (which could only occur thanks to the division of labor and process of civilization afforded by agriculture) and drastic increases in agricultural productivity allowed a large part of humankind to attain a better quality of life than we had as hunter-gatherers.  And even this is based on a level of resource use that is probably not sustainable in the long run.

Black male privilege

This is an NPR segment from a professor who has written about what he calls "black male privilege".  It's a provocative name for something that doesn't seem that controversial to me.  Essentially the professor, L'Heureux Lewis, argues that our society's narrative and focus on the very real oppression of black men is sometimes to the detriment of black women and the black community as a whole.  

I don't presume to comment on how accurate or not is Lewis's analysis of black society, but I believe that what he is describing is a trend that applies to anyone or any group that feels oppressed or under attack.  When you are being oppressed in some way, it is possible to "center your oppression to the exclusion of others", as Lewis puts it at one point in the interview.  By focusing on your or your group's own oppression and suffering, you can ignore the suffering of others, or what's worse, you can contribute to that suffering.  I'm not even just referring to the sort of sterile "oppression Olympics" that can occur when we try to argue and hash out who has it worse among women, gays, blacks, Jews, Latinos, etc.  This type of self-centered argument occurs mainly in online fora and really doesn't hurt much of anybody. 

No, what I am more concerned about is when a focus on our own suffering leads us to hurt others.  In today's interconnected world, almost all of us serve as both oppressor and oppressed in different aspects of our lives, or at least we participate on both ends of a larger, worldwide societal dynamic that creates winners and losers in each situation.  A white woman may be getting paid less than her male colleagues doing the same job, but she can also frame a black man for a crime he didn't commit based on the credence that society gives her testimony.  That black man is abused by the justice system, but he just bought food whose low price is determined by the terror and threats levied on the undocumented Latino immigrant workforce in the fields and restaurants that provide the food.  A tractor driver in that Latino farm labor workforce gets paid poorly for his work, but he owes his job at a California rice farm to the voracious demand provided by the Haitian market thanks to a series of unfair and damaging agricultural policies forced on Haiti by US political pressure over various decades.  Even the Haitian farmer, who is destitute because her millet can't compete on the market with the imported, subsidized California rice, is wearing shoes and clothes made in China, without worrying about the working conditions in the factory that made them.  And to bring it full circle, the Chinese factory worker suffers from a lack of worker protection, but also benefits from the trade and industrial policies enacted by the Chinese government, which have drastically reduced the job prospects for that white male US employee that was getting paid more than his female counterpart.

Almost all of the examples in my hypothetical chain are economic, and are thus beyond the control of any individual person in terms of assigning "blame" as oppressor or oppressed.  Who wins and loses in an economic transaction may seem to some like a separate question from other aspects of oppression or advantage, like for example standards of beauty or legal rights or how we treat one another.  But firstly, economics underlies and is intertwined with other aspects of privilege or disadvantage in a society, such as the justice system, racism, intolerance, physical violence, standards of what is acceptable or beautiful, etc.  Secondly, by participating in any economic transaction or any other interaction, we are in one way or another making a small choice in what values, what laws, what working arrangements we promote with our economic decision.  And in that sense all our actions occur within and contribute to the prevailing economic and social arrangement of our society, whether or not we are aware of the underlying structure (of racism, of cultural values, of political economy) that informs our own decision and determines its larger effects.

The bottom line is that unless we become more aware not only of our own travails and suffering, but also of the suffering of our fellow human beings, and above all how we ourselves contribute to or fight against that suffering, we are all condemned to continue suffering.  Only by going beyond our own bubble and trying to envision and create systems that make us all better off will people in general improve life for themselves and for others.  In this respect I welcome Professor Lewis's call for black males to recognize not just their peril but also their privilege, but I would extend that call to all of us.  It is good to attempt to overcome our own oppression at the hands of others, but we must make sure that we do not overcome oppression by becoming oppressors ourselves.

The supposed STEM crisis

This is an article I ran across some months ago, about the purported STEM crisis.  STEM stands for Science, technology, engineering, and math.  The STEM crisis is that we in the US (or in India, or in a number of countries that are worried about the same thing) don't have enough scientists and engineers to fill current and future positions and thus advance our economy with a basis in science and innovation.  The article points out pretty clearly that this supposed crisis, this lack of qualified STEM workers, is an absolute myth.  By no measure, in no area, is the US short of scientists and engineers.  In fact the contrary is true; we produce many more of these workers in our universities than there are available positions to absorb them.

The article's takeaway is that those perpetuating this myth are science and engineering companies, whom it behooves to have a large pool of unemployed engineers so as to keep wages lower, and certain elements in the national government, who want the prestige for our country of having so many technology workers.  The only area in which there truly might be said to be a shortage of STEM is in the general public, who would benefit by having a more firm grounding in the principles and logic of science, math, technology, and engineering, in order to inform their own lives and their own (non-STEM) work.  This would best be achieved by increasing funding and teaching of STEM in grammar schools and high schools and perhaps adult education and informal education programs.  But according to the article, we do not need more funding to universities for STEM.

We'll miss you, Philip Seymour

I am shocked and saddened to learn that Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead of an apparent drug overdose.  I can think of very few actors that were as daring and omnivorous in their roles, or as subtle and human in their depictions of even disagreeable characters. 

Is McDonald's cheap?

A friend and I were arguing about this today.  He felt that eating at McDonald's is more attractive to many people than cooking at home because McDonald's is cheaper.  I contended that McDonald's is in fact not cheaper than home cooking, for a few reasons:

•  no matter how efficient McDonald's supply chains may be, they can't be much more efficient than most supermarkets.  Both are operating in a streamlined, low-margin industrial food chain.
• Hence the difference between McDonald's or any other restaurant, and home cooking, is that a restaurant needs to pay labor costs and make a profit, while you don't.  Granted, when you cook you are not accounting for the opportunity cost of your own labor, so in that sense home cooking usually will be more expensive, unless you think your time is worth even less than the pittance McDonald's pays its employees.  Then again, if you really want to do a full accounting, you'd have to price the exercise benefit you get from being on your feet in the kitchen, the psychological benefit you get from being in charge of your own food and preparing something for your family, and especially the tax subsidy that we are all essentially paying to McDonald's by our taxes' going to food stamps and Medicare for the company's underpaid employees.  Plus you'd have to count as your own opportunity cost time the time you wait to get your order at McDonald's

But without getting into all these details of hidden costs, I mainly wanted to dispute the idea that eating out can ever really be cheaper than eating in.  So I set about doing some calculations.  Here goes:

A McDonald's double cheeseburger is on the dollar menu.  It contains:

2.3 oz ground beef

1.8 oz bun

1 oz process cheese

0.3 oz ketchup

0.3 oz pickle slices

mustard and onions negligible amounts

price: $1

BUT WAIT A MINUTE!!!  I JUST LEARNED THAT THE DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER NOW COSTS $1.59!  THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!  ANOTHER VICTORY FOR HOME COOKING! 

If you made the same thing at home, it might play out as follows (I use more beef to account for the weight loss after cooking, and I need to use 1.25 grocery store buns since they're lighter than the McDonald's ones):

3.1 oz ground beef * $8.99/48 oz = $0.58

1.8 oz bun = 1.25 Harris Teeter buns * $1.49/8 buns = $0.23

1 oz process cheese * $3.69/16 oz = $0.23

0.3 oz ketchup * $3.99/64 oz = $0.02

0.3 oz pickles * $3.59/32 oz = $0.03

total price: $1.09

In some ways I overestimated the homemade price just to be conservative.  You can play around with this price--you can lower the bun price by 8 cents if you shop at Costco.  Or you can cut 20% off your cheese price, and get better quality cheese, by buying cheddar in a block instead of pre-cut American singles.  Or 6 cents off the cheese if you go to Costco.  With that your homemade option would be even cheaper.  That said, the homemade beef I used here was fattier, and thus cheaper, than if I had used an 80% lean ground beef like McDonald's does.  So in that sense I'm underestimating the homemade price.  In any case, $3/lb for low-grade ground beef seems expensive to me, but I couldn't find any online grocery site that had it for less.  I'll bet that you could get better ground beef for a sight cheaper in the Midwest, especially if you could buy from a wholesaler getting the same industrial Cargill meat as McDonald's surely uses.

Okay, so even for the double cheeseburger, which I'd thought McDonald's won out on because it was using it as a $1 loss leader, home cooking is a much better deal.  And this is at Harris Teeter's, a generally more expensive grocery store, and without using any coupons or anything.  Let's see some other menu items:

French fries:

McDonald's:

$1.79 minimum for a large fries consisting of about 130 g potatoes, and 25 g cooking oil

Homemade fries (fresh potatoes lose weight when you fry them, so you have to buy a bit more than 130 g of fresh potatoes)

140 g potatoes * $8.99/20 lb *1 lb/454 g = $0.14

25 g oil * $29.82/35 lb * 1 lb/454 g = $0.05

For fries, the homemade option is a clear winner, costing one ninth, or even up to one thirteenth, of the price of McDonald's fries.

Likewise for a Coke, a small (16 oz) pop at McDonald's will cost you a dollar or more.  Get 32 cans at a Costco, and you're paying 51 cents per 16 oz.  This is a 100% McDonald's markup.

I'm sure you could do the same thing with any menu item at McDonald's or any other fast food place.  The point is that, even though they cut costs by massive economies of scale and shamefully underpaying workers, no restaurant can compete with home cooking on a per-meal cost basis.  So why do people, especially poor people, eat at McDonald's and places like it instead of home cooking?  I don't mean here to add yet another contribution to our national pastime of shaming and scolding poor people for eating worse than the bourgeoisie.  Hell, I don't even know if the poor really do eat substantially more junk food than the middle class in the US, which certainly has some pretty bad habits itself.  My aim is to understand why anyone, in particular those who can least afford to overpay for food, would eat out instead of eating in.  I think there are a few things operating here:

• By now "food desert" is a well-known term, and is the typical reason given for why the poor tend not to eat as well as the middle class or the rich.  It describes an area where there are few or no full-service grocery stores in convenient transportation distance.  If you have to spend lots of time and money on transport to go buy groceries, and then you can only buy what you can carry, then the grocery store's prices effectively rise for you.  But at least in Chicago, the food desert issue doesn't entirely explain bad eating habits of the poor.  In fact, some of the poorest areas, like Englewood or Altgeld Gardens (I choose these two examples because I've worked in both places) actually have decent grocery stores that are accessible to a large part of the geographical area.  Conversely, plenty of wealthy suburbs are in fact food deserts--you have to drive a long way to any supermarkets.
• I think more important than this idea of physical access is money liquidity.  By definition, poor people don't have a ready cash supply.  So buying the 35 lb box of cooking oil that I used in my calculations here, or a 20 lb sack of potatoes, or even 3 lb of ground beef at a time may not be an option.  And certainly not the $55 Costco membership!  If you only have $5 to make a meal for your family tonight, it doesn't matter that the 20 lb sack of potatoes is a better buy per ounce than an 80 cent portion of french fries, because you don't have the $10 for that sack of potatoes.  So you pay a smaller absolute price right now (a few dollars at a time) instead of a bigger chunk up front that is cheaper per unit in the long run.  You're buying squares instead of getting the whole carton of cigarrettes.
• Similar to the lack of money liquidity is the logistical impossibility of smart shopping for a poor person.  If you only have a few free hours at a time between your jobs and then sleeping, and especially if you don't have someone you can trust your kids with, when are you going to be able to block out 2 hours to dedicate to a shopping trip?  Even if you're unemployed, it's possible you can't find time for grocery shopping between taking care of kids (preschool isn't free in most places), or dropping them off at and picking them up from school, and you don't want to chance walking busy streets without having your hands free to grab an errant child.

All this shows that, though McDonald's is not cheaper than home cooking, in many cases a poor person is probably making the most rational choice by shopping there.  In both the money liquidity example and the logistics example, you know you're not getting the best deal, but you don't have the luxury of preparing ahead to get that deal.  Beyond the price per pound or per calorie (which, I repeat, IS NOT CHEAPER AT MCDONALD'S!), the poor are factoring in the issues of cash liquidity and time scarcity.  And when you do this, McDonald's, or junk food, or buying overpriced chips at the liquor store, may make the most sense.